Neutralinojs 2024 Roadmap

At the end of every year, we typically publish a new blog post about the annual achievements and plans of the Neutralinojs project. In the past few years, we published the roadmap article at the end of each year, but from 2024 onward we'll bring this post to you at the beginning of every upcoming year to start each new year with fresh plans by looking back at the previous year. So, here is the review of 2023 and plans for the brand-new 2024!

We could publish seven remarkable framework releases, nine neu CLI releases, and seven client library releases with new features and stability enhancements by fulfilling the developer community's needs in 2023.

Achievements in 2023

Core maintainers and the friendly community accomplished the following achievements in the last year:

• Published the Neutralinojs client library as an NPM package: @neutralinojs/lib
• Introduced a new inbuilt file watcher API for subscribing to file system events
• Improved the filesystem API by adding binary file-handling support to the openFile function
• Extended native window features by adding window startup positioning and persistent window state
• Added a way to extend the default user agent string within the window mode
• Implemented multiple development/production config files support with a new command-line option
• Improved the neu CLI program with better, productive frontend library support by invoking frontend library commands automatically, i.e., running the frontend library's development server automatically with neu run
• Stabilized and improved the framework by improving the codebase, enhancing existing stable APIs, and fixing bugs reported by the developer community

Project growth

In 2021, our goal was to stabilize the framework to help the community build production-level apps. In 2022, stable features, API enhancements, security improvements, and DevOps implementations made Neutralinojs a high-quality, production-grade solution for all cross-platform desktop app developers. Now, medium-sized companies, startups, freelancers, and individual developers choose Neutralinojs over other popular frameworks due to its simplicity, lightweightedness, productivity, and active community support. 

We'll keep adding developer-focused productivity features, app development features, and security/performance-related enhancements to compete with other cross-platform desktop app development frameworks.

Community

Without the support from the community, it's undoubtedly impossible to bring Neutralinojs to the current level. The Neutralinojs developer community supported Neutralinojs development by reporting bugs, suggesting project enhancement ideas, submitting code contributions, and reporting security vulnerabilities. We are certainly glad to see the new developers' engagement with the Neutralinojs journey.

Here are some highlighted community statistics:

• 7.2k GitHub stargazers in the framework repository (15% increment)
• 1.2k+ Discord members (~40% growth)
• 134k+ neu CLI downloads on NPM (~65% growth)
• 15k+ client library downloads on NPM within a year

Popular developer newsletters like JavaScript Weekly and Node Weekly helped us reach more JavaScript app developers by broadcasting Neutralinojs releases to tech experts. Developers helped us spread the news about Neutralinojs by posting blog posts and YouTube videos. Some app developers supported Neutralinojs by becoming sponsors!

Sponsors and finance

MacStadium and Microsoft supported Neutralinojs with cloud infrastructure within the last year: MacStadium offered us a free Mac mini instance, and Microsoft offered us free Azure sponsorship credits to run a Windows 10 virtual machine. Unfortunately, our Azure sponsorship ended in 2023, but we'll apply for the sponsorship program again.

Seven paid members support the Neutralinojs author via Patreon to allocate more time for the project maintenance-related tasks. We appreciate every donator's support and hope you'll be with us during this year.

As mentioned in this article , the original author and the core developer team have no plans to monetize the Neutralinojs project with paid services and revenue-oriented licensing models. We'll never strive to build a commercial project around Neutralinojs. Our only lifelong goal is to maintain the Neutralinojs project as a fully-featured, purely FOSS, transparent, cross-platform desktop app development solution that follows the donation-based financial model.

Roadmap 2024

In the last few years, we improved the project as a stable, simple, productivity-first desktop app development framework with basic features that every developer seeks. 2024's plan is to compete with other popular desktop app development frameworks with fully featured native APIs, tools, and developer resources, as explained in the following milestones:

• Compose a detailed guide for creating cross-platform app bundles (not installers) 
• Create a new page in the official documentation for listing community projects 
• Release the Neutralinojs builder community project with GSoC 2024. This project will help app developers create platform-dependent installers (i.e., Debian installers for GNU/Linux systems) for Neutralinojs apps via the neu CLI
• Using cross-platform C++ file system APIs instead of platform-specific functions within the framework source code, introduce new file system APIs based on C++ file system functions
• Delivering features requested by the developer community

Apart from the above milestones, we'll add more APIs, features, and developer tooling to compete with other cross-platform frameworks since our framework core is now stable.

Join our Discord server and become a member of our developer community. Consider making a monetary donation if you would like to support the project financially. Consider making a code contribution and becoming a project committer if you wish to donate your time to Neutralinojs.

Send us a pull request to this GitHub repository if you would like to list your app on the Neutralinojs apps page.

Thanks for reading.

Build an app with Neutralinojs today—feel its simplicity